Important note: this BuddyPress release was built in a short time frame (we even skipped the beta release) to be ready for the release of WordPress 5.8. Our team’s primary goal for 9.0.0 was to migrate the BP Legacy Widgets to new BP Widget Blocks. You don’t necessarily need the latest WordPress 5.8 pre-release to test the BuddyPress 9.0.0 Release Candidate, but we’d be happy if you could use both pre-release versions to have your feedback about your experience with managing the BP Widget Blocks within the Widget Block Editor.
“Release Candidate” means that we believe the new version is ready for release, but with more than 200,000 active installs, hundreds of BuddyPress plugins and Thousands of WordPress themes, it’s possible something was missed. BuddyPress 9.0.0 is slated for release on July 19, 2021, but your help is needed to get there 
.
You can test the 9.0.0-RC1 pre-release in 4 ways :
- Try the BP Beta Tester plugin.
- Download the release candidate here (zip file).
- Check out our SVN repository:
svn co https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/ - Clone our read-only Git repository:
git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/
A detailed changelog will be part of our official release note. In the meantime, you can check the 9.0.0 milestone changes list from our Trac environment.
In one picture, here’s what to expect in 9.0.0
The 10 BuddyPress legacy widgets will have their corresponding BP Blocks so that you can fully enjoy them within the next Widget Block editor and of course inside your Post/Page Block Editor.
The BP Block collection is going to be tripled from 5 to 15 Blocks 
How you can help
This is really important: this release also marks the string freeze point of the 9.0.0 release schedule. And we have less than 4 days to update BuddyPress translation.
So if you speak a language other than English, please help us translate BuddyPress into as many languages as possible!
PS: If you think you’ve found a bug, you can share it with us replying to this support topic or if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on BuddyPress Trac.
